I spent March and April this year in Lao PDR, the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos. I had been in the capital, Vientiane, last June to interview with the Lao Institute for Renewable Energy, (LIRE), regarding the possibility of volunteering with them. So now I was joining their team of around 20 people, Lao and foreign, employees and volunteers, engineers and economists. LIRE does feasibilty studies, publishes reports and generally informs the debate on renewable energy in Laos. I was hoping to head a small team to test charcoal burning stoves and perhaps to do some PV training with LIRE’s founding partner, Sunlabob. Labob is the Lao word for system, thus Sunlabob, the only professional renewable energy company in Laos, headed by an astute German ex-pat, called Andy.There had been personnel changes since June and a change of focus at LIRE, so I did my best to fit in and be useful.

It gets pretty smoky when you light six charcoal stoves all at the same time!

By sheer coincidence, my friends at the Aprovecho Research Center in Oregon had been hired by the EPA to do a couple of workshops in Laos, and their visit just happened to coincide with my stint at LIRE. So, my first contribution was organize the “testing laboratory”, which was the broke-down garage outback of the LIRE office. I got electricity supplied, a good stock of wood and charcoal, fire prevention equipment and a myriad of small items that helped the actual testing go off smoothly. I was able to interface between LIRE, the other participating NGOs and the Aprovecho team, two of whom had not been to Asia before. Their presentation on stove design and testing in a big downtown hotel was well received. The actual testing was good fun as many participants, from different parts of Laos, as well as Vietnam and Thailand had never done anything like that before.

The Hmong girls are leaning on an ancient stone quern, for grinding grains.

Vientiane is a somewhat sleepy capital, flat and dusty and situated on a bend in Mekong river. With 70% of the population still living in remote mountain villages, Laos is described as one of the poorest countries in the world, but that is not the impression one gets in the towns or the more accessible rural areas. There, the impression is of a country whose economy is really starting to take off, new 4x4s abound, consumer products are easily available and new Mcmansions are being built so fast, you would think that bricks were going to be outlawed next year! This is the same effect that I was to witness a couple of months later in Burma: namely, the energy radiating from the Chinese economy is giving all its neighbors a good suntan! Chinese investment in both countries is enormous and local markets are flooded with Chinese products, mostly of inferior quality. Some electrical statistics on Laos: 80% of the population is on the electric grid, 94% of the electricity comes from hydro electric dams, there are two giant dams already built and 20 more planned, including several on the Mekong itself. Who is financing and building these dams and will ultimately consume all that electricity? Why, the giant to the north, of course.

Can you spot the MSG?

The Aprovecho team and a LIRE team including myself, spent a week in Savanakhet, the second largest town, giving a week-long stove testing workshop. Savanakhet was laid out by the French colonial administration and has wide boulevards and a spacious feel to it. It is a commercial hub, being situated on the Mekong at the Thai border, with Vietnam only a four hour drive away. Here, we conducted the Controlled Cooking Test, which consists of the same meal being cooked three times, by three different cooks on two different stoves. As we carefully weighed the ingredients we recognised all of them except one, which was something like salt, but with longer crystals. In reply to our questions, we were told it was called “make better”. After further questioning we realized it was the dreaded MSG, seen above in the packet with red printing. Over the 18 meals, the cooks used nearly one pound of the awful stuff!

A family that makes charcoal stoves together, stays together!

The most interesting event during that trip was a visit to a local, family run stove factory. Everyone was involved from grandma to the little kids. Their production techniques were primitive and production low, but their enterprise and hard work were quite evident. Unfortunately, since USAID introduced the original “Thai Bucket” charcoal stove design twenty years ago, there has been quite a bit of “design drift” and use of cheaper materials which has led to less efficient stoves being produced.

I wonder where the other parts of this vehicle are and what vernacular devices they are part of?

Back in Vientiane, I came across a company I felt sure the FBI would like to find out about. I thought perhaps it was the epi-center of intellectual property theft, (IPT), worldwide, as a huge awning proclaimed “The Idea Copy Center”. But on further investigation it proved to be just a hole in the wall, one machine operation. My dreams of cracking the IPT ring in Laos lay in tatters. Oh well!

The fish pond in a remote mountain village

But then came the big trip that showed me the real Laos. It was to the north-eastern province of Xieng Khuan, around the area they call the “Plain of Jars”. Due to my presence, LIRE had been hired by a Swiss NGO to troubleshoot a solar water pumping system and to test some new stoves in remote Hmong villages in the highlands. Chanthapaseuth, my sturdy assistant, and I took the overnight bus to Phonesavanne, the regional capital. It’s at about 3,400 ft in elevation and a cool welcome change from the sticky heat of Vientiane. In fact, I was warned that temperatures in April might reach 110 degrees F in Vientiane, so I only brought T-shirts. Oh, the folly, Bruce! This year, nighttime temperatures sometimes plummeted to below 50 degrees and I had to buy a heavy sweater and two extra blankets to survive. But the next night it would be so hot that even a cotton sheet was too much. I blame the oil companies and global warming, I don’t know about you.Part of our duties up there was to do tests on some Vietnamese-designed fixed cook stoves. These were made of local building bricks with a cement top, pretty massive fellows! We conducted the Water Boiling Test on three of these stoves and one traditional, 3-legged stove for comparison. The massive stoves performed quite well, though it was a very small sample that we tested and the conditions were somewhat less than scientific.​

Our trainee stove testers take time out for a quick chat and a joke. The massive stove lurks behind.

But the most interesting part of the trip concerned the history of the Plain of Jars, both ancient and modern. Carved out of stone, some of the jars are very large, with mouths about 3ft wide. Most researchers think that they were originally carved to contain the human remains of tribal leaders between 1,000 and 2,000 years ago. The jars have been knocked over and lie at awkward angles, but this was nothing compared to what was to happen to the region during what is locally referred to the Second Indo-China War, which we know as the Vietnam War.

A young woman transports her water the old fashioned way.

During that conflict, the North Vietnamese supplied their troops in the South by way of the famous Ho Chi Minh trail, part of which ran through the Plain of Jars. Laos, although a neutral country, not involved in the conflict, became the most most bombed country in the history of the world. Twenty four hours a day for almost nine years, B52s dropped bombs of all kinds, in an attempt to thwart the flow of materiel. Much of that ordinance failed to explode and is still lying under the ground on the Plain of Jars. Every year many hundreds of local people lose limbs and even their lives as they step on unexploded ordinance. The Phonesavanne area is full of reminders of that sad history – a local restaurant called “Craters”, which has shell casings up to 5ft high on its patio, the groups of white jump-suited de-miners who meticulously comb through the fields for UXO (unexploded ordinance) and the houses which sit atop 5ft shells used as support pillars. I was consulting with a family who melt waste aluminum to recast it into spoons and I was surprised to see that they used a shell casing, cut in half as a crucible. They asked me to redesign their wood- burning furnace incorporating the shell casing. When I asked if they wouldn’t run out of shells for this purpose, they looked at me if as I were weak in the head saying, “We will never run out of shells”.

A US shell casing in the backyard of the headman.

The US has not stepped up to the plate and taken responsibility for this gross violation of human rights. Indeed, Australia provides more funding for de-mining than does America. But, almost unimaginably, the Lao people do not hold rancor in their hearts towards Americans. Most Laotians were not born when these events took place and the government has pragmatically toned down its anti-imperialist rhetoric since the fall of the USSR.The Laotians have to be the most mellow people in Asia. There is a regional proverb that I will paraphrase in closing:“The Vietnamese plant and harvest the rice, the Thais sell it and the Lao listen to it grow!”